I’m a citizen of this country, with all the rights and responsibilities that come with this particular social contract. So I am somewhat alarmed that the existence of my particular experience and expression of gender is not recorded. The state uses the information collated by Stats NZ to inform policy decisions. This implies to me that a non-binary identity is not considered in NZ policy.

Saturday was election day in New Zealand, and while the final configuration of parliament is still being negotiated, as has become normal under the proportional representation system, it’s petty clear that New Zealand has voted for a continuation of a neo-liberal approach to governance.

Although it’s beginning to fade from the newscycle, I have a few opinions about the recent injurious removal of a passenger Dr. David Dao from a United flight. As reported on Fortune.com, United released first-quarter earnings, and apologized for the second time.

The first time I purchased my own makeup was in 1994 at a pharmacy in Chartwell Square, a sprawling shopping mall in suburban Hamilton. I’d been pilfering my mother’s for years, but in my ill-fated first year of university I had drawn down the “materials costs” component of my student loan and I was heading in for some concealer.

Twenty years later and I still get a little sense of unease when I wander into the women’s wear section of Farmers Lambton Quay, or spend fruitless hours looks for a non chintz print edition of a t-shirt dress in the Lyall Bay Warehouse. I still notice the glances I get when I’m going around with makeup on my face, that are absent when I’m being read as male.

Entitlement. It’s a work that I’m reading more and more often of late. Used to describe an attitude born of various privileges. Take New Zealand’s former Prime Minister tugging on a waitresses ponytail. I’d class that as entitled behavior. Clearly John Key felt that he had tacit permission to lay his hands on this young lady.

I have all the tools at my disposal for writing, I have a nascent audience, the good lord has seen fit to give me the ability to turn a phrase. Yet, my word count, in the last three months of 2016, has been curiously low. What’s going on here?

I was the first one in my family to be waylaid by a mental health speed wobble. Oh LaQuisha, she’s so crazy. But as the decades ticked over, the others started to fall too. This is when I realized I was the canary. The illness was in the family all along, it was just that I was that much closer to the psychic metal than the rest of them.